Quote:
Originally Posted by Michele
I did make up one thing, a sort of standard for Orcish names. A prevalence of guttural and plosive consonants, the exclusion of fricatives (unless you consider the aspirated [h] as such), a preference for voiceless consonants, and a preference, as to vowels, for u and i. A famous tribal leader was named Hurkutk.
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I've recently had fun coming up with a long list of Orc names. I wasn't thinking about phonology in explicit terms; the rule I used was that if it sounded vaguely "orcish" and made me chuckle, it went on the list. But looking over it, in vowels I've got a heavy preponderance of o's and u's, along with short a, and the consonants r, l, m, n, and s appear almost exclusively in clusters, which are frequent. Names almost all end in either a hard consonant, or /dj/ (spelled -ge). So I've got names like (m.) Zargulge, Yorgort, Gudge, Durtzak, Grubnog, (f.) Shubnub, Yagrat, Bildag... and if nobody else is as amused by those particular sound clusters as I am, that's fine, at least players will probably be able to remember and pronounce them.
As for Elvish names, I always and constantly steal Tolkien's work, though I use it more as a framework than a dictionary. Dwarvish, less so; the
Dwarrow Scholar has a good attempt at a working model of a Dwarvish language not too far from Tolkien's concepts, even if the presentation format is unwieldy, but I haven't made much use of it yet.